Press Archive

SDSC Visualizations Featured on the Science Channel's "Top 100 Discoveries"

Published 01/19/2005

La Jolla, California - Animations from the San Diego Supercomputer Center's (SDSC) visualization department will be featured tonight on The Science Channel's countdown of the "Top 100 Discoveries." Airing this evening at 8 and 11 p.m. (EST), the segment will feature scientific chemistry animations created by SDSC's team of visualization experts.

Designed to visually demonstrate chemical reactions such as ionic bonding, covalent bonding and radioactive decay, the animations give Science Channel viewers an inside look at basic atomic processes that were once theories and have since been demonstrated to be true. The visualizations highlight a number of atomic properties that contributed to the significant scientific discoveries highlighted during the show.

Using the TeraGrid network, each 15-second animation took an average of 10 hours for an SDSC visualization researcher to create and took 128 CPU hours to render. To view these animations, log on to
http://visservices.npaci.edu/projects/discovery.

About SDSC

In 2005, the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) celebrates two decades of enabling international science and engineering discoveries through advances in computational science and high performance computing. Continuing this legacy into the era of cyberinfrastructure, SDSC is a strategic resource to science, industry, and academia, offering leadership in data management, grid computing, bioinformatics, geoinformatics, high-performance computing, and other science and engineering disciplines. SDSC is an organized research unit of the University of California, San Diego with a staff of more than 400 scientists, software developers and support personnel, primarily funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). For more information, see
www.sdsc.edu.